By Morley Evans
October 08, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- Canada was never as good as it has always been
advertised to be and everyone thinks it is, but Canada is much
worse since Steven Harper managed to weasel himself into the
Prime Minister's Office. People everywhere can compare the
treatment in Canada of Omar Khadr to Conrad Black.

Omar Khadr, after being captured as a child, was imprisoned for
years in the infamous GITMO torture centre to force him to make
a "confession" to patently ridiculous and indefensible charges.
Now having grown up to be a young man, Khadr has been released
into the custody of so-called "Canadian justice". Omar Khadr is
and always was a Canadian citizen. His treatment should serve as
a warning to every Canadian citizen who is not a member of the
Canadian élite: you are worthless and there is no justice in
Canada.

Conrad Black was imprisoned in a nice place in Florida after
having been given a real trial in Chicago where he was charged
with lying and stealing his investors' money. In Canada, Black
would have never been brought to trial since he is one of the
anointed big-wigs. Upon being released, this convicted felon,
Black, who relinquished his Canadian citizenship years ago so he
could become a member of the British House of Lords, has been
welcomed back to Canada where he lives in his mansion in Toronto
and appears as a celebrity on the CBC, the Canadian Brainwashing
Corporation. Black's career as a bully, con-man, liar and thief
since he was a boy have been documented over the years.

Black is not a Canadian citizen. Black is a big fat liar and a
thief convicted of grand larceny in a real trial in a real
court. Khadr is a Canadian citizen. His "confession" was made
under duress, to put it mildly. Every decent Canadian should be
outraged by this travesty. Even some of Canada's élite should be
appalled. It exposes Canada for what it is and Canadian
institutions for what they are. The people who run Canada tell
Canadians to salute the flag and obey them. It is disgusting.

October 28, 2010 - "National
Post"
Canada -- In the 1930s, that great legal innovator Joseph Stalin
introduced the show trial. The accused would stand up in court
and willingly, even eagerly, confess to the most fantastical
crimes. At the first great show trial, in 1936, Grigori
Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other former senior Communist party
members admitted to being members of a terrorist organization.
They said they had plotted to kill Stalin and other Soviet
leaders. In the following years, as Stalin's purges picked up
steam, show trials featured increasingly incredible stories,
usually involving the accused admitting to being agents of
Western imperialism.

What made men confess to things that were unlikely, sometimes
impossible and usually unsupported by other evidence? Torture.
Sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against their wives and
children. To stop the pain, you had to confess to whatever it
was that the interrogators wanted to hear. And then you had to
get up in court and willingly confess to it all over again.

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a
violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other
things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

On the main charge, "murder in violation of the laws of war" (a
crime that doesn't appear to even exist in international law,
given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not
violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the
then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that
confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained
under conditions that any normal human being would describe as
torture.

Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan. He was the only
survivor after a firefight and an air strike on an al-Qaeda
position. He had been wounded in his shoulder and in both eyes,
shot twice in the back and was near death. It was alleged that,
just before he was shot, he had thrown a grenade at attacking
American troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was
15 years old.

He then spent several months in the hellhole that was Bagram
airbase in Afghanistan, where he claims -- credibly, given all
that we know about what went on at Bagram -- that he was
subjected to sleep deprivation, the chaining of his hands above
his head for hours, that he was hooded and threatened by dogs,
and sometimes forced to urinate on himself because he was not
unshackled to go to the bathroom.

His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the teenage
boy that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S.
prison, where a group of black men would gang rape him to death.
Ponder that for a moment.

He was interviewed about 25 times by this interrogator, Joshua
Claus. Claus was also the interrogator for an Afghan taxi driver
named Dilawar who was chained to the ceiling and beaten to death
in Bagram in 2002; Claus pled guilty to his involvement in the
affair and received a five month sentence. In a lovely Orwellian
touch, the U.S. government insisted that reporters covering
Khadr's trial not name Claus, but instead refer to him as
"Interrogator 1."

In Bagram, Khadr confessed that he had thrown the grenade that
killed an American soldier. No one saw him do this, so his
confession is really the only evidence of the act. Last summer,
U.S. military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish ruled that the
confession, despite the obviously coercive circumstances under
which it was made, had been freely given, and could be used
against Khadr in court.

This week, Omar Khadr was offered the following choice: plead
guilty, or face two different routes to life in prison. He could
go to trial, and thanks to a confession that would be laughed
out of any real court of law, he'd probably be convicted. But
even if the court somehow found him not guilty, the U.S.
reserved the right to detain him indefinitely as an enemy
combatant. The only sure way to get out of jail early was to
tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear.

On Monday, Khadr was even forced to cop to other crimes,
including the killing of two Afghan soldiers, something he
wasn't even charged with, and for which the prosecution appears
to have had no evidence. And, in a nice touch that Stalin would
have appreciated, Khadr appears to have also been forced to sign
away his right to sue his jailors for the various forms of
deprivation and abuse that he was subject to. In court on
Monday, Col. Patrick Parrish repeatedly asked Khadr to confirm
that he was agreeing to these terms willingly, that he really,
truly, sincerely wanted to plead guilty all of his own accord.
Khadr said yes. They could have told him to confess that he had
simultaneously piloted all four hijacked planes on 9/11, and he
would have done it.

And so the Bush administration project of ridding the world of
terrorism by means of torture comes full circle. The U.S.
military and CIA, ordered to use force to extract information
from detainees, something that violated not just U.S. military
tradition but U.S. military law, had to come up with new
interrogation techniques, and quickly. They turned to history,
including copying communist coercion-based interrogation models,
such as those that captured American troops had been subjected
to during the Korean War.

The original communist torture techniques, which for a time
inspired the standard operating procedures at Abu Ghraib, Bagram,
Guantanamo and the secret black sites, were not designed to
elicit truth. They were designed to produce false confessions:
That was the whole point. They were designed to force people to
say what interrogators wanted to hear -- yes, I am a capitalist
stooge, yes I am a Trostkyite, yes I am a terrorist.

And now Guantanamo's very first military tribunal has its first
guilty verdict, thanks to those methods of coercion first
perfected for the Soviet Bloc show trial. My God, what have we
done? Somewhere in hell, Joseph Stalin is smiling.

- Tony Keller, a former editor of the Financial Post Magazine,
is a visiting fellow at the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation.

'You don't care about me,' Omar Khadr sobs
in interview tapes

Tapes reveal interrogation by Canadian
officials

Tuesday,
July 15, 2008 - "CBC
News" A teenage
Omar Khadr sobs uncontrollably as Canadian spy agents question
him at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in
interrogation footage released by his lawyers Tuesday.

The video
is of poor quality and the voices are often inaudible, as it was
never intended to be viewed by the public. But it shows the
Toronto-born Khadr, 16 at the time, being interviewed by
Canadian Security Intelligence Service officials over several
days in late February 2003.

The
footage is from five formerly classified DVDs consisting of 7˝
hours of questioning that took place six months after Khadr was
captured, following a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. Khadr, who
is a Canadian citizen, has been held at Guantanamo Bay for six
years on charges that he killed a U.S. medic during a firefight
in Afghanistan.

Khadr's
defence lawyers have repeatedly called for their client to be
returned to Canada, arguing he was a child soldier and was
tortured to extract confessions.

Although
he appears reluctant to answer many of the interrogator's
questions, Khadr is shown at one point on the tapes saying to
his questioners, "Promise me you'll protect me from the
Americans."

Upon
further questioning, during which time interrogators insisted
Khadr be clear on the truth, the teen said: "They tortured me
very badly at Bagram [detention facility in Afghanistan]."

"They
tortured you?" the interrogator asked.

"Yes,"
Khadr replied.

"And you
had to say what you said?" the interrogator asked.

The tapes,
made public under a court order obtained by Khadr's lawyers,
offer a rare glimpse of interrogations of Guantanamo detainees
and of Khadr, now 21. The only Western foreigner still being
held at the naval prison, Khadr is scheduled to go on trial
before a U.S. military commission in the fall.

The U.S.
Defence Department granted special permission to CSIS and
Canada's Foreign Affairs Ministry to question Khadr after he was
brought to Guantanamo Bay.

Shows
wounds from firefight

A brief
video excerpt of the tapes was released via the internet early
Tuesday morning, followed by disc copies of the five DVDs made
available in the afternoon at the lawyers' offices in Edmonton.

At another
point during one of the interviews, Khadr raises his orange
prison-issued shirt to show wounds that he says he sustained
during the firefight.

Omar Khadr is shown here at 15, not long before he was captured
by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in July 2002. (Canadian Press)

He
complains that he can't move his arms and hasn't received proper
medical attention.

"I'm not a
doctor, but I think you're getting good medical care," the
interrogator responds. As with all the agents in the video, his
face is blacked out to protect his identity.

Khadr
cries, "I lost my eyes. I lost my feet. Everything!" in
reference to how the firefight in Afghanistan affected his
vision.

"No, you
still have your eyes and your feet are still at the end of your
legs, you know," a man says.

When the
agent accuses Khadr of crying to avoid interrogation, Khadr
tells the agent between gasping sobs, "You don't care about me."

As Khadr
continues crying, the agent calls for a break.

"Look, I
want to take a few minutes. I want you to get yourself together.
Relax a bit. Have a bite to eat and we'll start again," the
interrogator says.

Then Khadr
begins sobbing with his head in both his hands, chanting over
and over again in a haunting voice. His words are difficult to
hear, and at first could be taken for "Kill me" or "Help me."

However,
Arabic speakers working at CBCNews.ca say the teenager appears
to be keening "Ya ummi," which is Arabic for "My
mother." (Asked about it after the video was released, Khadr
lawyer Nathan Whitling told reporters: "Your guess is as good as
mine.")

'He was
screwed up'

Jim Gould,
a now-retired foreign service officer who once visited
Guantanamo Bay to assess Khadr's mental and physical condition
and was present when the videos were shot, said he thought Khadr
should have received "some proper care, custody and probably
some treatment."

"He had
been abused or betrayed by everybody who had been in authority
above him — his father, the Americans, the people in the cages
or the cells with him. He was screwed up," Gould told CBC News.

"I thought
at the time and think today he would be a whole lot better off
if he was in a different environment. I was quite conscious of
the fact he was young, under the age where we would … try him as
an adult, and I sympathize with him."

Khadr's
mother, Maha Elsamnah, emotional after watching her son's
interrogation, expressed a deep sense of loss for her family and
uncertainty over what she should do.

In a brief
interview with CBC News on Tuesday morning, Elsamnah — who lives
in Toronto — said she feels the need to protect the five
children still with her.

Her
husband, Ahmed Said Khadr, was an avowed al-Qaeda sympathizer
before he was killed in fighting with Pakistani military forces
in 2003. Elsamnah refused to say more without speaking to her
lawyer.

But
retired soldier Sgt. Layne Morris, who was in the firefight in
which U.S. medic Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer was
killed by a grenade, allegedly by Khadr, said he has no sympathy
for the Guantanamo detainee.

"Whoever
has sympathy for a young snivelling, whining, crying Omar is
misplaced sympathy because this is not a man who deserves any
sympathy," he told CBCNews.ca.

"I use all
my sympathy for Chris Speer's widow and two children. I have
none left for Omar Khadr."

Morris has
repeatedly stated he believes Khadr is responsible for throwing
the grenade that killed Speer.

Interrogation not unusual: Morris

Morris
said the interrogation itself looked mild, and no different than
any normal police interview.

"Anybody
who wants to tell me that was over the top has certainly never
been to war and never been to any police interview. Cops are
more aggressive than that, geez. That just offends me that
anybody is outraged by that knowing the circumstances."

Khadr's
defence lawyers, however, said they hope Tuesday's release of
the videos will spark public support for their efforts.

"We
Canadians stand for compassion, we stand for the rule of law.
And what you are seeing there is the abuse of the rule of law as
Canadian courts have indicated about Canadians and Canada's
involvement in Guantanamo Bay," lawyer Dennis Edney told CBC
News.

Edney said
Canadian officials should have asked Khadr about potential
torture, but instead went into the interview without any help
for the then teenage boy.

"We don't
do that in Canada and that shouldn't have happened to this
young, most vulnerable boy in Guantanamo," the lawyer said.

He also
said Khadr suffers from several injuries, including the loss of
sight in one eye and difficulty with the other, as well as
shrapnel and bullet wounds.

Referring
to Khadr's sobbing chants, Edney said, "It's the cry of a
desperate young man. He expected the Canadian officials to take
him home."

But Morris
slammed Khadr's lawyers, saying they're more interested in
attacking the system than defending their client.

"This is
just another arrow in their quiver to attack the system and Omar
is a convenient vehicle to do that. I think that's an amazing
feat to try and sway public opinion in favour of Omar."

In May,
the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that branches of the Canadian
government had to hand over key evidence against Khadr to his
legal team to allow a full defence of the charges against him,
which include accusations by the U.S. that he spied for and
provided material support to terrorists.

Several
Canadian media organizations then applied for and obtained the
release of the DVDs, as well as a package of documents that made
headlines last week.

Officials
knew about some aspects of treatment

The DVDs
come nearly a week after internal foreign affairs documents were
released showing that Canadian officials knew Khadr had been
sleep-deprived for weeks to make him more willing to talk during
interrogations.

The report
says Gould learned during a visit to Guantanamo on March 30,
2004, that Khadr had been put on a "frequent flyer program,"
meaning he was not permitted to remain in any one location for
more than three hours.

In another
portion of the videotape released later in the day, the
interrogator asks Khadr about the 2002 firefight between
suspected Islamist militants and U.S. soldiers, and how the
fight began.

Pentagon
officials said Khadr, who was 15 at the time, ambushed American
soldiers with a hand grenade after the four-hour fight at the
suspected al-Qaeda compound in Afghanistan.

In
response to a question, Khadr said it wasn't the Americans they
had planned on attacking, but the Northern Alliance — the
anti-Taliban coalition.

"So a
firefight started. The Arabs shot at the Americans, the
Americans shot back. Did you guys make a decision that you would
fight till the end,"

"They made
the decision," Khadr replied.

Khadr
shook his head when asked whether he was going to fight until he
died.

Asked
whether the event overtook him and he had to react, Khadr said:
"I had no choice."

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